


Stratum

by foxdreams



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Acceptance, Character Study, Exploring the depression that is canon kairi, Gen, He'll be fine tho, Kairi and Riku Continue To Not Talk About It, Kairi-centric, Melancholy, Pearls as metaphor, Sora is still missing, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Very lightly implied soriku, You know when you go to turn a lamp on and realize the bulb is blown out and nothing happens, post-kh3, that's the vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 07:34:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21352555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxdreams/pseuds/foxdreams
Summary: Over the careful cultivation of years, she has learned to appreciate the pearls she can make, even if she’s the only one who knows they’re there. And they are real to her, the jewels of her tongue, invisible strands wrapping her throat, tighter and tighter as they ascend.It’s so effortless for her, now.(A little something for Kairi, small and sad)
Relationships: Kairi & Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Sora & Riku & Kairi
Comments: 20
Kudos: 85





	Stratum

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes the concepts come in the night and just harass me until I can get them out, and this was one of those times. 
> 
> Lightly inspired by diamonds and toads.

When Kairi had been just a girl, she had loved pearls. 

Necklaces, bracelets, and family heirlooms were all tucked away in velvet boxes that she was allowed to lift and claim and borrow. 

The surface, so smooth—so easily wiped clean of dust, how bright, how beautiful. Her grandmother had gifted her the first one of her own, so polished she could see herself reflected in it, and set it into a necklace with a locking clasp, at her insistence, so she would never,  _ ever _ lose it.

Something in her  _ liked _ that a simple oyster could take in something malefic and make it perfect and clean and whole again, smooth out its edges and make it coveted and  _ loved _ ; transform it through its own power.

She had received them for every birthday, and each one was lovingly strung on a necklace, nestled against her princess-heart, infinitesimally heavier with every passing year.

She had not understood the way they were made  _ then _ , of course: the years of patient toil beyond the understanding of a little girl, or how many hands were behind each shimmering little jewel around her throat. 

Radiant garden had given her everything; protected her like its own child and held her, cocooned and safe and encased; held her so tight to its breast she could almost block out the whispers she had heard beneath.

Then, she had fallen, and had nothing at all.

Until she had met Sora and Riku, that was. 

They held out childish hands, rough and calloused like hers were not, and she gave them each a pearl as a symbol of their friendship.

Often, she had wandered by the docks, a gangly too-short girl wearing a thick strand of pearls over her beach clothes, always chasing too close to the restricted areas; always flitting atop the fishing nets, playing hopscotch over the squares.

Nobody had ever stopped her, the strange orphan girl who fell from the sky; her heart like a gilded cage.

One day, after she had a  _ father _ again (even if she didn’t have a memory), she had gone down to the docks and watched the oysters dredged up from their resting places among the rocks far below. She had folded her legs (careful and perfect) as many gloved hands wedged tools in their shells and pried them apart to press down on tongues with probing fingers and remove their guarded prizes. 

Once thrown back, the shells would float on the surface for a few seconds, iridescent and shimmering in the light, as if to remember the sky before sinking back to the depths.

“Does it hurt them?” She had fretted, tugging on her father's hand, who had indulged her by sitting with her the whole afternoon. He often called her  _ his _ pearl.

“No,” He had told her gently. “No, Kairi. They can’t feel pain the same way we do.”

“Oh,” she had said softly. It was hard to believe it.

For the first time, looking on, she wondered:

Did the oyster feel lighter, for having its treasure taken away? Or did, after the space of years, prefer the weight? 

She had gone home and pictured it for hours: what it would  _ feel _ like to take something into your own body and make it harmless against you,  _ contain _ it for the span of years, and then give it away.

Later that night, she had stood at the edge of the rock wall behind her house, and she broke the clasp of the heavy strand across her hands. 

She had held it over the crashing water, one long line of heavy moonlight weighing across her skin. 

For one heartbeat, she had held it. Then two. Then three.

Her neck had felt empty without the weight. Quickly, guiltily, she had snatched her hand back.

She learns to drill and thread her own pearls, in time. There’s plenty of them on the islands, and the work is precise and takes intense focus, which she likes. 

She adds one the day before the island falls, for luck, and to mark their journey. 

She won’t add another for over a year, because she had forgotten why she had strung them in the first place; the reason lost in the halls of a white castle she barely remembers.

She never wants to forget again. 

She has to start a second strand, a third strand, a fourth--when she finally  _ does _ remember, it feels like penance for the things she hasn’t said.

Over the careful cultivation of years, she has learned to appreciate the pearls  _ she _ can make, even if she’s the only one who knows they’re there. And they  _ are  _ real to her, the jewels of her tongue, invisible strands wrapping her throat, tighter and tighter as they ascend.

It’s so effortless for her, now.

Every little barbed sentence is simply rolled back into her mouth; every aborted (a princess would never) insult another pearl she finds it harder to speak around; more and more and more until she can’t speak at all without them spilling from her lips.

Riku doesn’t recognize her: this quiet, distant girl.

She feels it. She doesn’t recognize him, either, this towering, self-assured boy-turning-man, but  _ that _ pearl is older than the rest. She’s used to it.

It’s midnight on the islands when he comes to her. She’s learned to leave one of the lights by the patio on as a symbol she’s there, because Riku always shows himself, sooner or later. He melds into a human shape from the shadows which hold him close, and always raps the door precisely once.

She has two minutes to unlatch the door before he turns and walks away to go to the play island to stare at the sky and think of Sora while refusing to treat his stubbornly accumulating wounds. She  _ knows _ this, because she can see into him as she can all people.

So: she opens the door.

His shirt is in tatters and there’s a long, angry scratch over parts of his face and across his throat, like whatever horrors he fights out there, night after night, had made a grab for his jugular. The gouges cross each other at points. She thinks the word  _ rake _ .

It’s obvious why he comes to her, on the islands he despised so much, and not the Tower, or the Land of Departure, or Radiant Garden, where efforts to find Sora are organized and overseen. She knows why, but it’s  _ nice _ to be needed.

She never judges him, never tells him he’s  _ reckless _ ,  _ stupid _ ,  _ selfish,  _ like Roxas. Never tells him he’s chasing his own death out there alone, like Aqua. Doesn’t trace the ragged, scarring edges of old wounds like Vanitas.

She just sits (poised and perfect), a bowl of warm water and a checkered wash cloth across her lap, and tends to the wounds, dresses them in bandages and gauze like they were never there. 

They wouldn’t dare scar under her hands, under the hands of a  _ princess _ .

Some part of her has always been selfish, because now, in this moment, he  _ needs _ her. 

She  _ lets _ him need her. Even if they both know better. 

This is how it’s always been between them, without Sora to smooth them over, grind their edges into coherency and harmony like tumbled gems.

She remembers what it had  _ felt _ like once, her princess-heart a swaddling shell around all three of them, then two, then one. 

A girl made of shells clinking in the wind; a body made to  _ protect _ and reform but not to keep.

Sora had slept on, but Riku had learned to make shells too, by then. Kept Sora in one just large enough for him to stretch higher during the long year.

She  _ knows  _ his shell had only ever been large enough for two.

_ It’s okay, _ she tells herself. She doesn’t mind. 

The new pearls scrape along her teeth.

“Sorry for bothering you,” Riku says quietly. “I forget time is different here.”

It’s a formality. “It’s okay,” she says, with a smile. The pearls press against the roof of her mouth to make room for her tongue.

“I was awake anyway,” she says. Sleep won’t come for her, anymore, not when she lies awake expecting unspeakable news to come at any moment. She has been preparing for the same news since the two of them left the island the first time. 

She wants to say:  _ if you keep this up you won’t come back at all, with or without him _ . 

Instead, she rolls it carefully beneath her tongue, where it can’t escape.

Carefully, she dips the cloth in warm water and presses it to his brow, the gash there deep red and garish against silver hair and pale skin. She can make this clean; she always does. Polished and perfect like nothing was ever wrong. But the  _ core _ , the seed she saw so long ago in him, shines through, an imperfection that chafes and that some part of her still longs to sand away.

“I was  _ close _ this time,” Riku mutters. She has learned he isn’t speaking to her, but to Sora, whenever he is. “I  _ know _ it, Kairi. Right here.”

He touches his crisscrossed chest with shaking fingertips, and she notices he has blood under his nails, so she grabs one palm to dip into the pool, ignoring his flinch. Her hands are always cold; he must have forgotten. 

Twists of red settle on the surface like an oil spill, bleeding color like curling fingers into the white. She’s hypnotized by them for a moment, how they come together and drift apart before disappearing completely. 

“It’s...stronger every day. He’s  _ calling _ to me, and it’s like...I can almost,  _ almost _ hear him. Just a  _ little _ more.”

He looks at her through challenging eyes, like he’s daring her to  _ doubt _ him.

“Can’t you?” He asks, like it would be a pearl in her own mouth. 

_ No _ , she thinks. The connection is quiet, fuzzy, like a receiver left off a hook from negligence rather than malice; a light left accidentally unplugged.

That’s her: a girl with a heart like an oyster, two people, cradled in nacre, that could have been hers, once, but weren't anymore.

“Aqua says he’s probably not strong enough to call to all of us,” Kairi says quietly. “It’s...like he’s dialing your number hoping you’ll be close enough to tell us what's going on.”

The  _ triumph _ radiates off him in waves, and Kairi sees what the force of  _ need  _ can do. Riku has flourished under its careful hands, while she has overgrown her shell.

“I’m sure he’ll come home soon. Then he can tell you all about his trip himself,” Riku says, and she is fiercely glad we will never try to pry open her shell.

She hums, because the weight on her tongue is precariously, fitfully balanced. She cannot speak.

Every scratch and burn is wrapped, every salve and cream endured in silence with just the waves between them, Riku’s head turned pensively towards her open window and the sky beyond.

He draws back, apology in his eyes. “I should get going,” he says, as he always does. “He’s waiting for me.”

The kitchen chair squeaks across the floor as he rises from it, and they both startle badly. A shared hollow laugh is not the same without three.

“Riku,” she says, the towel wrung between her hands, the rivulets of pink like veins across the skin.

He stops, inclines his head to glance back at her, a flash of...something there, an irritant, a  _ why are you keeping me  _ stare _ . _

She could give it to him, if she wanted. Upend the entire basket of her pearls, every little she was left behind, forgotten, allowed to forget. Every time Sora should have remembered her, but didn’t. All the times she saw the distance between them widen, and let it go as the hand of fate plucked them out.

She won’t.

There is a thalassa shell charm in the pocket of her dress, and it burns where it brushes against her, the weight of a secret. 

It’s a foolish, childish thing she had strung together one night, with green pearls to match Riku’s eyes. She knows she won’t give it to him, won’t make him  _ lie _ to her, like he surely would.

Sometimes, she forgets what time she’s in. The weight of memory helps remind her.

“Be careful,” she says finally, another jewel drips like honey from her tongue. If only they could see it. “Sora would want you in one piece when you find him.”

“Yeah,” He says fondly, because he’s thinking of Sora again even as he looks at her. “Thanks, Kairi. We’ll see you soon.”

He mercifully ends their encounter, disappearing into the humid night air. The low rumble of a Gummi Ship sounds over the gathering storm on the waves in the distance. 

Tonight, she knows, he will leave to find Sora for the final time. It hangs over him like a sword of Damocles she wishes she couldn’t sense so easily, the pressure a hammer against her skull.

They will not come back again, at least, not to her. She won’t ask them to; just one more request to add to the stack of her letters to Sora, organized and tidy under her bed, but never, ever sent.

An oyster can tell when it’s time to eject their prize.  _ That _ , she does feel

The pearls crowd her tongue until she swallows them back; she feels them clink together, packed together tightly in their own little shells in the safety of her princess-heart.

**Author's Note:**

> You ever think about what a tragic character canon Kairi is? haha........yeah,


End file.
